It’s been a great platform for getting to know new people, share and debate ideas. But i’ve increasingly seen that it’s a platform for right wing media. It’s become the voice of Trump and Brexit and whatever we do to try and change this, it’s just not working. The voice of these extremists is being amplified on Twitter by very powerful algorithms under the control of extremely wealthy people intent on manipulating society to bend it to their will. And Twitter doesn’t seem to be doing anything to counter this. In short, I don’t think we can trust what we read on social media anymore and I for one am focussing on getting my news from places that I trust. It’s why I have become a member of the Guardian Newspaper – I don’t agree with everything they say, but I do agree that it’s honest and is an organisation that shares my values. Twitter doesn’t.

It’s not to say I won’t go back. I just need a break and to see what it’s like to remove myself from social media at a time when the world seems to be consumed by it’s power and the powerful people that are in control of it.

If you want to get in touch – email is an open, safe and reliable form of communication I’ve been using it for 25 years and I think for now I am in control of how the content is used… Perhaps you could email me a “like” of your own…

Living in a speech bubbleNotes from learning languages later in life – is there a digital solution?

I grew up in rural oxfordshire in the 1970s. I was taught languages in the 1980s. It didn’t go well. In the 90s I studied AI and was happy learning programming languages. But natural languages remained a mystery. This century I wanted to change that. I started to travel more and the more I travelled the more obvious it was that I couldn’t communicate outside of english and my own ‘language’ of hand waving… which I think we can all agree is all rather embarrassing. Hands up if you’ve been embarrassed by me…

But then smartphones and apps arrived and Duolingo was born.

I had something that would help me learn languages anytime anywhere. The key to my multilingual future had arrived. And I’ve gotten pretty good at it. The only downside to my amazing DuoLingo french and german is that while I’m amazing in DuoLingo… I’m not quite so good in the real world. It’s a little bit like how well homeopathy and vitamin supplements work incredibly well.. Right up until the point that you become sick… It’s easy to convince yourself that Duolingo is teaching you to understand and speak a new language. The Koolaid feedback of “you’re 20% fluent” can very easily lead you down the path of false hope. Don’t think for a minute that you will survive a taxi queue at Tegel airport if you have learnt German from that friendly multi-wardrobed owl…

Something needs to change. I’ve become incredibly adept at making that DuoLingo ‘sentence’ sound that gets you through the voice recognition task. I have, like many other ‘games’ learnt to play the app more than I’ve learn to learn a language. Don’t get me wrong, I think DuoLingo is a very useful tool and a powerful learning aid – but it’s speech recognition is currently terrible.

So I’ve started to play with other things.

In October I turned Siri to German. It’s kind of weird and as in your native language is mostly totally useless. However, It’s useful for spelling out the words as you say them. It’s useful, but always seems to resort to “I’ve found this on the web for you” or “Ich habe dies für Sie im Internet gefunden”. But I like it and I’m not sure why. Perhaps I feel someone is speaking to me in German not judging me like the man in my local wine shop does…

I’ve tried a range of free translation apps – and the UI on them is generally so incredibly bad you never really get to evaluate their translation qualities. Popups when you’re learning is a terrible feature.

Smartphone apps have amplified the power of speech recognition. They’ve taken it from a lab or a desktop activity into real life. An example of this is with our polish builders in Berlin who use Google Translate to tell us the things they want to tell us

PB: “Kein wasser heute”Me: “Wann ist das” PB: “Jetz”. Me: “OK”.

What was interesting is that they started using the audio on google translate as a natural thing they do. I then started to play with google translate audio functions. And it’s pretty good. I tend to use it to support the german texts I’m learning from. I find it a powerful way to test pronunciation – and also to hear the correct way to pronounce things when I’m not sure.

Some of my attempts at google translate. Interesting how Wie Geht’s was translated as Gate Inn and this prompted a Tripadvisor link…

What’s great is that if you think the technology isn’t working – let’s say you don’t think the speech engine isn’t up to scratch and it’s not your german, it’s google’s tech…. Then you can switch back to your native language and check. Simple things work well. Like learning the German alphabet. I was convinced google translate wasn’t working when it wouldn’t recognise my version of the alphabet. So I checked in english… and it worked fine. So I went back. Listened to google’s translation of the english alphabet and then retried it. And it worked. I’m now more confident when I ask for me “ah-bee tageskarte” from the shop outside Nordbahnhof.

What I think is interesting is just how much difference putting speech recognition on a mobile device made and how much it is opening the door not just to translation but to learning. With the potential for the IoT to further amplify (think in-ear live translation) language translation and its effect on the world, I think we’re heading into incredibly exciting opportunities. However, it will also amplify the ability for surveillance, for large-scale data harvesting and algorithmic decision making. Things that in the current turbulent political world, I think we should all be thinking a lot about.

In the middle of January during a particularly cold spell in Torino we went to meet our friends at Casa Jasmina. With Vladan Joler, his lovely family and friends, and the brilliant Davide Gombe who leads the Officine Innesto crew, we met to talk about what we wanted 2017 to be. In two short days we made our own Vermouth, gave an impromptu ‘lecture’ to the fabulous students from the Masters in Journalism at the University of Torino, and explored the interface between decentralised IoT, invisible labour and the materiality of the networked society (yes bits means real atoms) .

Let’s begin with a quote I tend to use a lot these days, a quote which keeps on resonating the more I explore an open internet of things.

The door refused to open. It said, ‘Five cents, please.’ He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. ‘I’ll pay you tomorrow,’ he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. ‘What I pay you,’ he informed it, ‘is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.’ ‘I think otherwise,’ the door said. ‘Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.’
Philip K Dick (1969), Ubik

Ubik by Philip K Dick is a 1960’s sci-fi novel. I’m assuming you’ve read it. If you haven’t, I would advise it. We spend way too much of our time thinking we’re original. The more you read the more you find out you’re not thinking anything new (says I who is perhaps talking to myself here, or more likely to my 13 year old son who really really should read more). It is a book about privacy. The privacy of our minds. It is a tale of the endgame between our preservation of self and the all-knowing – the Ubik. Something that fiction has always done to enable us to imagine alternate lives, people and places. Let me back up from the book review and talk more about what I wanted to talk about. I guess you can’t help channeling the inner sci-fi nerd when you’re visiting the experimental house of a scifi writer… A ‘house’ in a disused factory block on the banks of the railway tracks from Torino Porta Nuova – Torino’s station at the end of the line.

Casa Jasmina is actually a combination of lab, gallery space and B&B, so it needs dynamic management. Casa Jasmina is not merely a kitchen, library, bedroom, and bathroom. It’s a public interface for a larger Internet-of-Things process of building things, acquiring installing things, removing things, repairing and maintaining things, storing things, recording and linking to things, and, last but very importantly, getting rid of things.

But I disagree.

Well, I agree with how they describe it, but I think this massive undersells it. I think it is a frontline bunker. I think it is bunker against everything that is wrong with the ‘disruptive tech’ movement of today. The grossly irresponsible greedy practices of Silicon Valley and its friends are pushing the boundaries of acceptable business practices. I think it’s wrong for a tiny region of the world to dominate technology as it does. I think it’s wrong that so much is being kept and controlled by so few. I see Casa Jasmina as one of the few beacons or bunkers of hope that is practically providing an alternative. It is where the rebel alliance would hole up in the winter planet of the Empire Strikes back. An alternative that is aiming to boost local resources, to add local value and increase local businesses and to share learnings and technological advancement in the open. And it’s a very special place. How many kitchens do you know with a 3D printer on the benchtop?

There are a few really special places in the world. Places I think of as headlands. A place where my head lands somewhere good. These are places that I feel connected and at home in. My home in Anstruther is one such place and the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad is another. Don’t get me wrong my #myYearInBerlin is amazing (i’ll talk more about that soon in another post – and genuinely feels one of those times later in life that I’ll ‘blink’ myself back to – but it’s not the same as these few places – my year in Berlin is about a time in my life – Anstruther and NID are about places). There is just something that clicks when I’m at the Chai Gate in NID. Or when I’m floating in the freezing winter waters of the north sea just outside Cellardyke Harbour. And last week I found a third such place to add to my headlands. That place is Casa Jasmina. It feels like more than a house. It feels like home. Home to something that the world needs right about now.

So what does the world need right now?

I think the world needs to find a way to connect to people and for people to connect to each other. I think that the disparity between the people who have and the people who don’t have, and the increasing gap between the two is a very unhealthy thing for the world. We only have to feel the icy chill of Brexit and Trump to know that this is not an imagined thing. It is real. And we can’t separate how the tech giants have played their part in all of this. Fake news being “good for business but bad for democracy” , racial bias in algorithms and gender equality are just some of the issues, and we could go on here (perhaps we should in the comments? . Living in isolation and the bubble of Silicon Valley isn’t healthy for the rest of the world. The world needs something new. Casa Jasmina is that new.

And here’s how.

A responsibility to placeIn Casa Jasmina, we respectfully acknowledge Giovanni Antonio Porcheddu and his client Carlo Garrone as our our spiritual ancestors. We are aware that we live in the shelter of their deeds, and that their civic struggle in Torino is also ours. We are in exactly the same place — just at a different time.
Bruce Sterling, Casa Jasmina, the grand-daughter of the Fonderie Carlo Garrone

Casa Jasmina is built in the shell of a disused foundry. It hasn’t been done up as a shiny renovation, it has kept the building as it is (graffiti and all) and added what it can inside to make it habitable. It doesn’t feel like an imposing architect’s ‘dream’, which can so often be a neighbour’s nightmare, it feels like a practical re-dressing to make a space useful and liveable. It feels supportive to the locale and is a humble way to breath new life into a building and a community. It has grown out of the place rather than landed upon it. This sense of place is something that increasingly is something that I care about and is very much a value of the Open IoT Studio and going to ‘real’ places is at the heart of our approach. Casja Jasmina is REAL.

Embracing life
When Vladan opened the door to Casa Jasmina on Friday morning after a night making our very own vermouth the night before.

It had the feeling of a family home. Coffee was made, his brilliant and super sweet kid was chasing the house’s pet vacuum cleaner robot, and the kitchen table was a family table (I go on a lot about kitchen tables and their place as the heart of social networking – http://webwiththings.tumblr.com/ ) . I loved the way that the family home switched to being a classroom, a workshop space, an office, a cafe, and back to a family home in the space of a single day. A stray bottle of wine on the outside windowsill is one of those clues that this space is made for living in.

Connected things aren’t always on
It really struck home that this was a place of experimentation. Prototypes were everywhere.

And not all of them worked. And this is important. Prototypes are just that and we can become obsessed that the lab is a showroom of perfection. For me, showing things in their honest state, which might mean broken, is refreshing. It takes the pressure off thinking “I can make something for this house”. We’re so used to having consumer items that are built for public testing, which can take years of ‘in-house’ testing before they come into your home or into a gallery. Of course things need to work when you buy them and there’s nothing more frustrating as visiting a museum of broken things (unless of course that’s what you’re expecting to visit!). Yet a working lab as Casa Jasmina is should be just that. Sweeping the reality of prototypes into our lives rather than presenting gleaming perfection is charming and reassuring.

Inviting neighbours
I loved the way that Casa Jasmina is not a house in isolation, that it co-habits a shared space with the offices of Officine Innesto, Fablab Torino and Toolbox co-working space. And I get the sense that more people will move in. A place where like minds and shared values gather. This is such a clear indicator of the health of a place – that it’s diverse, it’s shared and it’s multi-cultural. I guess that’s a fundamental difference between working in the open as opposed to creating closed secretive competitive places and places.

IoT is poised to be in both an exciting and a frightening place right now. The possibilities of what IoT can do is considerably more powerful than just being about an individual accessing and interacting with their own things – that the cloud and remote servers collecting enormous amounts of data about our lives and storing it forever is quite another thing. In another scene in Ubik the lead character tries to bribe his fridge to give him cream for his coffee. I wonder if Philip K Dick had been writing now, I wonder whether his fictional discussion with the fridge would have looked a bit different? That perhaps it might be about a person trying to bribe someone else’s fridge to give them access to their data? Perhaps every object has its price? Perhaps it’s not a case of making something secure of private in a binary way, that it’s much more about making things reflective of real life – that you could set the ‘bribe’ level of your appliances to provide data for the right cost. That you are fully in control with nuanced, delicate controls rather than absent or blunt tools we have right now? If the IoT devices that are constantly recording and understanding what we say, there is the very real practicality of them being called into the courtroom to act as witness to a crime as recently happened in the US. Ah well, that’s good – let’s catch murderers I hear you say, but what about when it’s about a series of appliances being called into a divorce hearing to help the court decide who has rights to the children? Or to a pet? Or your medical insurance company suing you for not following the correct diet? What happens then? Do you want your data to be accessed without your consent -would you then not wish that you had the rights and ability to have control over what data is collected, where it is stored and who has access to it?

The debate for the future of our home needs to happen in a trusted place. Open source technologies and ways of working provide practical safe environments for conducting research and development of trusted technology in a way that opens up not just the source code, but the very debate of the future of technology. The open, welcoming and very human experimental home of Casa Jasmina is the place that I want to see this happening. It’s why it’s a very special place. A place where I feel at home and a place where I want the future of the home to be.

Find out more – go and visit! Go and make something there. Go and be a part of it. If you want to come and do something with the Open IoT Studio – then get in touch. If you’re in the UK you can go and find out why I nominated it for Designs of The Year.

The SelfReflector is an internet connected mirror that is able to calculate your age, play music from when you were a teenager and print out this image on a TapWriter.

For centuries we have looked at ourselves looking back at us through mirrors. We all have our own very special relationship with ourselves through the magic of the ‘looking glass’. It might be a 3am reassuring conversation that all is well. It might be a motivational speech as we clean our teeth. We might give ourselves a telling off after an argument that we wished we hadn’t had. The mirror opens a mental world to our telepathic selves – after all it is only when we look at the person in the mirror can we truly read their thoughts. The mirror provides a space and time for being together with just yourself. Is there anyone that knows you like the mirror knows you?

In SelfReflector we wanted to explore what this meant to people. We wanted to play with this sense of trust, with the sense of reflection, with the sense that a simple reflective surface opens up so much about who we are and what we think of ourselves. Yet we also wanted to reflect on what happens when technology comes into our lives in very personal ways. As an outcome of a research project exploring the Internet Of Things (IoT) in the context of the UK High Street we wanted to explore the ways in which the High Street supports our sense of self in a myriad of nuanced ways and create propositions of how technology can enrich this. Acknowledging the high street as a place where we find out about ourselves from our teenage years onwards we wanted to create ways in which the IoT goes beyond supporting the purchasing of goods, instead enabling more meaningful experiences in line with the realities of what we do in shops.

At a time when 30% of shops in general and 59% of fashion retails are using CCTV cameras connected to the web to covertly gather personal data on their shoppers, we wanted to offer alternative propositions that respond to the playful, exploratory nature of what humans do on the high street in social and personal ways to learn more about themselves.

SelfReflector is a mirror that takes pictures of people looking at it. It uploads the pictures to a webservice that uses image processing to estimate the viewer’s age, their facial expression and their mood. This data is then used by the mirror to select music from when the viewer was fourteen – an age that has been identified by Prof Daniel Levitian (director of Music and Perception, Cognition and Expertise at Mcgill University) as the “magic age for the development of musical tastes”. The image is then printed on the IoT social network system TapWriters for secure sharing with a small number of trusted friends. Beyond the low-fi printed image, there are no copies of the image stored. If you are in doubt about the ability of music to connect us to ourselves, you only have to read David Bowie’s letter to a 14 year old fan in America.

SelfRelector is currently installed in a boutique glasses shop, SPeX PisTOls, in Dundee. It was designed with the owner, Richard Cook, as part of a research programme investigating the role of IoT on the high street. Richard has curated songs from 1925 based on knowledge of his customers and their musical tastes. The research is ongoing and you can visit Richard, play with the SelfReflecter and think about how you might want the Internet of Things to come into your life in the way you want it to.

Notes

Designed by Jon Rogers, Jayne Wallace, Mike Shorter and Pete Thomas.
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as part of the Connected High Street project http://www.theconnectedhighstreet.co.uk/

The TapWriters
http://www.theconnectedhighstreet.co.uk/a-sense-of-me-on-the-connected-high-street/

Image recognition on the High Street
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/12/shops-could-soon-be-targeting-ads-according-to-your-feet?CMP=twt_a-technology_b-gdntech

https://csc.turtl.co/story/55ee93d8bbfd077f2d4e22ee

Fourteen is the magical age for music taste development.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/opinion/24hajdu.html

David Bowie’s letter to a 14 year old fan
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/read-the-letter-david-bowie-sent-to-a-14-year-old-fan

It is 6am and I’ve woken up a little early. The sun does funny things in Scotland. It doesn’t get hot like the most of the rest of the world and while it forgets to get up in the winter, it forgets to go to go down in the summer. So it’s been light for a few hours… And I started to think about this: What is a social network? I’m asking this question because I’m going to build one or rather I’ve started to build one and now I want to tell people about it. Building social networks is something I’ve been doing all my life in the real world – as have you. At some point in the mid to late 1970s in the blistering heat (15C) of a long hot summer my best friend in the whole world, Toby, and I became ‘blood brothers’. I think we struggled a little with pricking our fingers to actually get blood, but we knew that the blood marked the friendship of the highest kind. We formed a network from the exchange in blood. Or at least, we formed a bond over the idea that we could exchange blood. That exchange marked us as special. We were a new form of kin.

Some forty years later at the very moment I’m writing this post, I have on my twitter account around one thousand five hundred and twenty five ‘followers’. That’s seems a lot – particularly as before twitter being followed was either a little creepy, or marked you out as having a particularly special relationship with a god.. my this one and a half thousand followers is nothing like Katy Perry who has seventy million followers. SEVENTY MILLION. That’s, like, nearly ten times the number of people who watched the Doctor Who Christmas special! How does someone do this? For me I have no idea who all but twenty five of my followers are but I imagine they are sitting there waiting with baited breath on my every 140 chars that comes through my fingers onto the screen. …

Said the BBC in March 2015, as apparently the footballer Ronaldo has over one hundred million likes. That’s a LOT of likes. I’m not sure I’ve liked that many things in the world in my forty four years of existence – and I like a lot of stuff (marmite, beer from barrels, fish in batter, swimming in the north sea, The Tiger That Came To Tea, France and the colour coding on resisters – beach towels with colour codes from resistors would be AMAZING.. but I digress, sorry).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

But what does having that many people follow or like you really mean? For toby and I, long before the web or of having heard of social networks, at a time when a friend was invited to your birthday party and a like was something less than a love, our network of two was sealed in an ancient bond that could never be broken. At least until we went to different universities, got jobs, got married, moved countries and had kids…But I’ve not become a blood brother with anyone since and that’s quite an amazing thing.

That physicality and cultural significance of an (albeit interpretation) ancient ritual made our friendship special. Blood is a precious limited resource and only one person got to be my blood brother.

The web has enabled us to escape the limitations of the physical world. Friending someone or liking something is all very easy. There’s no contract. No precious resource. No end. No friction. It’s all so very easy. But it all feels a little bit hollow. Sometime in the late 1980s I shouted “all back to mine” in the local pub when my parents were on holiday. I was seventeen and it was more than a bit scary having most of the village of Benson (population 4,000) walk the one mile to my parents’ house at midnight. I didn’t know anyone so I mostly hid upstairs and waited for them to leave. It was dawn when they did and I spent the rest of the day clearing up and realised that cigarette burns were hard to cover up… That the house was broken and that I was pretty much doomed. What would happen if Ronaldo did the same? All back to my facebook page for an after hours party? Would there be any mess to clear up? Would anything happen? Would it be any point? Would it create any difference in the real world – the world that Ronaldo and his one hundred million likes occupy?

My point being is that physical social networks are very very different to digital ones. Duh! Of course they are I hear you scream. Yet you say this, but most of what we’re doing with IoT technology is building one thing that can connect to the web. Rather than building networks that are powered by and ARE the web, we’re simply adding dead nodes to an existing system. My call to action is to design entirely new forms of physical networks that are a part of, and not an aside to, the web.

Have you thought of building your own bridge between these worlds. Could we make physical/digital social networks that the Internet of Things (or the web with things as I continue to call it) technology can enable? I don’t think that connecting household appliances to the web is particularly social, exciting or interesting – do you?

So why not build our own physical social network. Which we’ve done. Or at least we’ve started to do. And I’ll share this with you here.

We have built the world’s smallest social network. It’s a network of small till-roll printers that are connected to the web powered by the amazing Electric Imp. We’re calling them Tap Writers. Because you tap at a screen and it comes out on paper – on all of the rolls at the same time. It’s changing a printer from a printing appliance into a social media device – where paper is the media rather than Facebook’s or Twitter’s screen. This limits resources (Katy Perry and Ronaldo would run out of paper pretty quickly if they had this network). We’ve created a social feedback mechanism by having a single button that you tap as a form of ‘receipt’ – a deliberately ambiguous interaction that is neither a ‘like’ or a ‘thumbs up/down’. It’s simply a response that is printed across the small network. We’ve installed seven in small shops, cafes and a yoga centre in Dundee. And we’re watching to see what happens. We want eight in a network and are looking for the next place in Dundee to join.

So how does it work? Mike’s been playing with the till rolls connecting to Imp using a bit of code from instructables. An amazingly powerful feature of Imp is that it handles Http messaging and it’s super straight forward to have all of the printers connected in a network. So this is great technically. Yet the thing that got me most excited is the scalability that Imp provides. With so few components in the TapWriters and the cost and scalable tools Imp has for mass production, we’re almost ready to go live with a product… a physical social network that connects people through paper…..

It’s quite exciting to have a social network. Next up we want to take it international so we’re heading to Mexico City to install another eight there with a Spanish translation built in.

So watch this space as this early trial has made me decide that we need to further this and we need to look at how we can design for physical, human and real networks – that are limited by resource and therefore force us to make choices about who we want in our network and what and when we say things. They do I think take the Internet of Things into a much more social space that I’m calling the Web With Things.

Want to take part in this experience? Get in touch – we’d love to talk to you about what we’re doing. Over the next twelve months we’re going to further this and build a number of physical social networks to find out if we can do this and what it will be like. We’ll share the results as we go and let’s see where this takes us… I promise if you join us I won’t be asking for any of your blood but I might be asking you to get physical with a few of your friends.

Earlier in the year the Product Research Studio joined up with our wing-commanders in DJCAD Make Space and RS Components to show our university how they could and arguable should operate. To move them from a traditional pre-web thinking institution into the new pull economy where the students lead the co-creation of the teaching and services they want. Ultimately we wanted to ask the question:

Can students collaboratively work with their university to make it work in the way they wanted to work?

This is what the day looked like…

This is a question we put to test with a 36 hour collaborative making event, or hack, in January 2015. With direct involvement from the most senior academic, management and support staff from across the university, we were a little nervous that we were opening a new door into a new way of working – that too be honest, we were not entirely sure what world it might open up on to.

So what worked?

The students
The students were AMAZING. Really, they blew away any prior expectation of how they would respond. We were confident that they would work hard and give quality outputs… but not quite at the scale that they did. They worked through the night (thanks to our wonderful Computing school for hosting!) and deep into new territories. Making ideas, concepts, prototypes and proving that there are an incredible range of options for our university (and others I might add) to think differently about the way universities deliver education and services.

The mentors
The mentors were incredibly committed. With pretty much round-the-clock support – they helped the students reflect-on, shape and deliver highly relevant original ideas that worked. The role of the mentors started three months before the event through building the right set of challenges and providing resources to support those challenges. It was very much a co-created space for students to play within.

A space to make
DJCAD Make space with @alinapier and @robcojackson was the heart of the event. Taking ideas from paper to reality through digital making and open hardware. Oh and not to forget the table tennis… althrough @cyberdees thinks we’ve a long way to go to match up to his MozSpace skills…

A future looking RS Components
A massive thank you to RS components for providing an incredible prize of 3D printer, Arudino, Bare Conductive and Raspberry Pi. Their support for the event has continued well past the 36 hours and has embedded deep into the learning and skills of our students. Don’t take my word – take a look at what our winning students, James Williams, Rhoda Ellis, Ryand Woods and Will Duncan have been doing with their prize in the 3 months following the event…

A Touch of Fry was our studios response to the Your Fry competition. This competition saw the one and only Stephen Fry make the content for his new book More Fool Me open source (text, artwork and audio). Along with his publishers Penguin Random House, they set a challenge to everyone to interpret this content in any way they wanted.

A Touch Of Fry explores what happens when the emerging technology of printed electronics enables the mixing of digital content and paper. By doing so it explores what happens when we connect paper to the web and what this might look, sound or feel like for the publishing industry.

By screen printing Bare’s conductive paint and connecting to their newly kickstarted TouchBoard, we have created a capacitive touch surface on the cover of More Fool Me. When you touch parts of the cover you hear different audio clips. The artwork remains the same we’ve just hidden a few audio easter eggs on the cover for people to uncover.

Next up, by adding an IoT platform such as Electric Imp, we will be able to connect the front cover directly to the web. This will allow updateable audio at any time. You could hear live updates of content throughout the day or night of Stephens thoughts, feelings and possible secrets – anything that Stephen wants people to hear.

Beyond audio, connecting the cover of a book to the web poses a much bigger question. It is the question of data. It asks us to think about what will happen when things all around us are connected to the web. It asks us who will have the read, write and execute permissions of data created by things. It asks us what shape the internet will be when we can connect it to anything.

A Touch of Fry was one of the three winning submissions of the YourFry project. We have plans to take this idea further, we will keep you posted with any developments.

Pi Love!

I’m not very good at looking after things. I’d like to be better, it’s just that I’m not. The roof on my house needs a few more tiles, my car needs a service, my bike is sitting in our cellar with more than an ample covering of iron oxide on its chain, and my laptop looks like it’s been used to dig my potatoes on the allotment that I do in fact look after pretty well. My neighbour across the street from me, on the other hand, is incredible. Not a tile is out of place, his many cars are spotless (his weekends mostly seem spent in blue overalls caressing what ever needs caressing on the underside of his vehicles) and his children cycle on shiny steeds that look newer than the day they were unboxed several years ago. It’s about love. I don’t particularly love the things around me. They’re functional stuff to do the things they are designed to do. For my neighbour, there is a lot of love in the things that he owns. A ‘Zen and the Art of Maintenance’ philosophy that I don’t have, and he does.

What, you might ask, has all of this to do with a Raspberry Pi, in particular the latest release of the Raspberry Pi B+? It’s simple, and it comes down to a very basic human instinct – the human instinct of love. The Raspberry Pi is the most loved computing device that we know of. A deep love. Not the lust the populace feels towards the latest shiny offering from Apple, but a kind of love that we Brits reserve for red telephone boxes, Routemaster buses and Ordnance Survey maps. We love Raspberry Pi. People who have no idea of the difference between Mac OS and Windows know all about the Raspberry Pi. My dad phoned me on the day it was released to tell me all about it. I didn’t mention that I was one of the many who crashed the RS website at 6am on 29th February 2012. My dad used a computer once in 2007. And the love is still there. When I spoke at Microsoft Research’s Think Digital event for a thousand school kids in December 2013, over a third put their hands up when asked who owned a Raspberry Pi (this might be because it was in Cambridge and it was a ticketed event for students who were considering computing as a further career – but impressive nonetheless).

The love goes beyond our nationwide interested is goes deep into the community that Pi have built.

And Pi listen to this community. They have listened in incredible detail to the grumblings from a dedicated community of people in love with their Pis. This community is Pi’s strength. It points to a sophisticated Twenty-First-century business model that could only exist in a world that has grown up with and through web 2.0. It’s a robust business model that I am absolutely certain will ensure that Pi will grow from strength to strength in the coming years. This is a business model with the power to change a single capacitor on a circuit. A capacitor that has been a notorious problem for the community. A single unit costing a few pence has caused the death of many of the first release of Pi.

When RS asked me to review the latest Raspberry Pi B+ I had to call in a big favour from our resident creative technologist and all round brilliant hacker, Ali Napier. Ali lives in a wonderful tech cave that would, if we lived close enough to Gotham City, have Bruce Wayne knocking on the door asking to borrow a charger for his utility belt. Ali’s tech cave is about to get a bit of a make-over, but we’ll leave that story for another day. Ali took the B+ into his cave and started to play. Now Ali and I are big on physical computing. It’s what we live and breathe. We’re huge fans of Arduino and in particular the Yun, and we’re completely in love with Electric Imp and everything it can do for the Internet of Things. We’ve dabbled with Pis – we’ve set up Minecraft and road-tested Scratch – all the things that are at the heart of the original and current mission. In our home town of Dundee there is a fantastic code club supported by Dundee Contemporary Arts and Brightsolid But we love it to be able to go beyond the screen and get into the physical world – to make the web physical. With this in mind, let’s get into the details that Ali’s uncovered.

Starting with the outside

The physical improvements that B+ has over the original. Overall it’s just so much tidier. Given we’re into the design of products, it makes so much more sense to have the board mountable with far less board overhang. Put simply – it’s easier to put in a box. It’s overall footprint with an SD card in place is a good 20mm shorter in length and 8 mms narrower – meaning we can make the things we design smaller. This has been achieved by replacing the standard SD card slot with a MicroSD, lowering the profile of the audio connector (with composite video), and making the USB sockets flush with the board’s edge. There are good hardware improvements too; the four USB sockets, 40 GPIO pins (we like the way the pinout of pins 1-26 mirrors the original, which helps with forward compatibility of older code) and the doubling of on-chip RAM to 512Mb. With the mounting holes now in place it’s clear it’s designed to be put into things. Things that can connect to the web. We like that.

We also really liked the ease and speed of setup. Something the original took a bit of a weathering from its online community.

Let’s go into the software in a bit of detail.

Ali flashed up an 8Gb class 4 MicroSD with Raspbian by using the straightforward directions from the Pi site. It was a little slow, but until card reading tech is sped up, it’s what we’re limited to for now. This delay is very much made up for with the reward of perfect first time detection of Microsoft keyboard/mouse, HDMI monitor and internet connectivity. Ali tends to stick at the Linux command line, so we never launched the GUI – he’s always interested in what’s going on under the hood. Once Ali verified the Pi had picke up an IP address, he got straight into Aptitude package manager to install updates, Apache 2 webserver, PHP5 and ALSA audio tools. What we want to be able to do is make things that connect to the web. In other words we need to be able to simply control pins and create sounds. Both of which were incredibly simple to do. Ali deosn’t really ‘do’ Python, which has emerged as the language of choice for the Pi. Instead, as with Arduino Yun, he puts together a bunch of shell scripts and calls them using tools such as PHP or compiled C programs. Being able to manipulate GPIO pins directly from the OS by writing values to files that represent each pin makes for a very happy Ali! We checked out audio quality as well, writing a few sound files to the SD card and playing them using aplay. There were a few audible artefacts straight off, but this was easily cured by maxing the audio output using the amixer utility. In short, in less than an hour, we had all the tools in place to create a pin-or-internet-controlled audio player, which is pretty cool.
Raspberry Pi is an incredibly agile, simple and powerful device that can power the things of the web. Things that can move, play audio and light up our world. All of this for around £25. That’s pretty much perfect.

It’s great to be back at the world’s most important place for design – The National Institute of Design India . I’ve been here before exploring Physical Apps India and this time I want to disrupt things in another way. I want to start to think about data and the digital economy in India. Consider this:

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India is a crowd economy. It’s a crowd society. It’s a crowd culture. But with no Kickstarter I wonder how right now it is becoming a digital economy. I have no doubt that it will very very soon. Evidence of this is India’s growing digital democracy. An incredible story is unfolding in the build up to this year’s general election. The opposition party’s leader Narendra Modi is leveraging his background as a chai wallah to connect to people across India. Every town has thousands of chai whallahs, in every train station, outside every major business, on every crossroad, outside every university campus, in fact everywhere. And so when Modi takes questions over a live webcast to audiences to thousands at chai stalls across the country you know that India is ahead of the rest of the world. When you connect this crowd thinking into India’s inherent Maker culture you are faced with the potential to radically change how the world thinks about digital and how the world thinks about connecting to data. Reading this in the UK, EU or US? Tell me, when was the last time you saw something being made, repaired or adapted? Beyond our cars and our houses, pretty much everything is a consumer driven culture. I’d love to have an iphone repair shop like this one in Ahmedabad.

So I ask you. How can we physically connect to our data that builds on the crowd based culture and deep routed sense of making across India?

The product design students I’ve been working with are exploring a semester-long project of designing for visually impaired. By working with the Blind People’s Association Ahmedabad they are exploring an ‘inclusive’ (skip to my thought at the end of this post about what I think about ‘inclusive design’ – discuss!) design approach to visual impairment. What I think is exciting is that given that we’re all visually impaired when it comes to data, is there not an opportunity to learn from people who spend their lives where ‘seeing’ is a multi-sense activity. I live by the sea (I know I talk about this a lot, but just in case you didn’t know that) and when a boat passes my kids (actually it’s me) want to know what boat is that, what’s it doing. I can try binoculars but if I’m lucky I can find the name of the boat… see that it’s an ‘army boat’ or a ‘oil ship’… but that’s it. I need to go online and find out more. The Marine AIS tracker gives me the eyes I need to see the data. The web and the data it enables access to opens up a new window on the world. Which gives a challenge – how can we explore data that comes off the screen an into our world in a meaningful way? I think we might be able to learn a thing or two about talking to people who know how to navigate the world beyond just sight.

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Footnote on Inclusive Design. OK, so I have a problem with the term ‘inclusive’. It sounds massively hierarchical and top down. It says, I’m here to help you. Which is often said with the very best of intentions. But there’s an assumption. The assumption is that you have a problem and I’m the expert here to solve it. We never treat people we really want to talk to this way. You wouldn’t write a invitation t a party saying “I’d like to include you in my party”. You’d never say “I’d like to include you at Christmas this year”… If we’re co-designing with people we should look to find common problems that we can co-design responses to together. Which is why I LOVED the brief that students had been given on working with the Blind People’s Association. We’re ALL blind to data and maybe we as designers could learn from people who had spend their lives in a world where ‘seeing’ is a multi-sense activity…

As the IEEE conference on Big Data moved into a new phase, an incredible collection of humanities and technology partners gathered to share stories of what big data means to them.

Ada Lovelace described herself as a poetical scientist and an Analyst. I would call her a storyteller and codifier. She was able to both tell stories and encode them in a repeatable note format… A father the poet and her mother the mathematician, she from an early age learnt to flit between writing and analysing…. She learnt how to communicate and write while applying logic an analysis. I’m a bit of a fan. My time travelling self would no doubt have fallen for the most important person in the history of computer science (I suspect it might have been love in just one direction – so let’s move on shall we, but before we do.. it’s worth noting (and this is steeling from a conversation from the met office disrupter Mike Saunby) that working with Babbage not only led to computer science it also led Joseph Whitworth devising standards (without standards you wouldn’t be able to replace a light bulb, tune a TV, listen to a record, drive a car, or take a medicine)…. But I digress. So what am I trying to say? I It’s this: that interdisciplinary across the humanities is not just a desirable thing, it is the life force of discovery that flows through human existence. And history continues to show us that when it happens then sparks (literally and metaphorically) will fly. Note: October the 15th is Ada Lovelace Day.

Getting back to the conference. It’s been a hard start, I won’t deny it (most least because the four people that might, just might read this blog have been incredibly patient with my rants about the lack of people… ). Today is another day all-together. Today I feel human. I feel connected. Today is different. I apologise for yesterday. No actually I don’t. I want to shout at being subjected to a difficult two days of struggling with poorly presented academic knowledge. Today is incredible.

In a wonderful interplay between acronyms and metaphors I have been delighted with the truly interdisciplinary work of technologists and humanities collaborating on meaningful human big data. Expressing doubt and confidence in equal measure. A dash of humour has been thrown in, but underneath has been a rolling and rising discourse about that has got not just under the meaning of digital humanities but has started to get under my skin. I want to know more.

What’s happened? What has happened is that Dr Tobias Blanke and Dr Mark Hedges King’s College London have put together a remarkable workshop on Big Humanities workshop

I want the reader to understand that the humanities presented was further from my academic knowledge than the computer science has been. Yet in this set of talks the computer science is so much more vivid and exciting. The canvas of humanities enables me to understand. I don’t know about Victorian poetry texts. Yet I could immerse myself in the understanding of a subject elegantly presented as a visual narrative…

The science appears richer, more understandable, further advanced and more meaningful when presented at the heart of humanities.

Technologists have not held back on owning their subject – OCR is thrown in next to NLP and Cluster Analysis. (And we don’t want this to stop – researchers need to use their languages if they are to give passionate academic talks). But maybe we need a guide? Some simple How, Why, What, Wows of big data computational techniques – why is Hadoop better for real-time analysis. What is OCR – how does it differentiate from pattern recognition. Etc. This isn’t a barrier – it’s an opportunity.

There have been a wealth of presentations – and you’ll have to go to the workshop organisers for academic knowledge on this. But some thoughts, insights and connections that I have had today go a bit like this.

“[A]t a time when the web is simultaneously transforming the way in which people collaborate and communicate, and merging the spaces which the academic and non-academic communities inhabit, it has never been more important to consider the role which public communities – connected or otherwise – have come to play.” (Dunn & Hedges, 2012”) ->here

In the closing comments a panel of speakers came together to start to discuss themes, thoughts and what-nexts for humanities.

I liked Andrew Prescott’s reflection as scholar, “As historians we don’t know who the user is. Is a curator a user?”. My thought on this is that we don’t need a new form of ‘user centred histories’, instead we should rethink how we collaborate. To embrace the idea of historians a participants in a co-design process. Has anyone done this? Are their persona’s documenting typical (or a-typical) historians? Are their design guidelines or ‘branding’ documents for working with history? Is this something we could look at? Would this make a working across disciplines an easier thing? Or am I just being another voice in a mix of ideas that is just finding its feet.

Another clear big difference in this workshop to the technology focussed workshops and talks was the variety of data. And while Variety is a core theme of IEEE Big Data, the definition of variety is actually pretty narrow in terms of the talks I saw. All of the talks mentioned variety and then went on to show something that handled numerical data in a structured database. In humanities it seems the problem is more complex, potentially much harder (for machines) and crosses time and materiality to connect with everywhere humans have made their mark. In these talks it included 19th century newspapers, interviews, travelogues, transcripts, photographs, films, guidebooks, poems, private letters, journals and novels. This richness of data makes the problem of data exponentially grow into new dimensions. There was a lot of talk about language and translation – which should be a reasonably trivial problem once it goes through google translate? Right? Yes, but does google translate have a setting for 17th century vernacular? Does it have a setting for how a small community in the Lake District describe their world? And how often does language change? How many time zones do we need to encode to capture textual data? The problem was big data and now, I really don’t know what kind of data it is. But isn’t that the deal – it is at this very point of dealing with data, when your head spins and your hard drive melts that you know you’re dealing with something that’s possible bigger than big data?

At times the excitement in the room morphed into nervousness. Is this to big? And just like our friends in IEEE who worry about the end of Moore’s law, the humanities were asking ss this the end of theory? No said Barry Smith, “We must be prepared for failure. As Beckett said: fail and fail better”. He then went on the remind us that “it’s not the first time we’ve had big data. It’s happened before and we must understand the future from the past”.

As someone pointed out in the audience: there is going to be a huge argument in the humanities…

And as Christie Walker from the AHRC closed things off with: “It’s going to be great fun to stand back and see what happens”. That indeed it is.